In case you missed the crying, wearable tells you your baby is mad

Babies have many emotions (calm, angry), and many ways of expressing them (crying, not crying). Busy parents have difficulty keeping up.

Here to disrupt the baby-monitor market is a new wearable, just for infants.

We’ve seen smart, wearable gadgets from the likes of Fitbit and Jawbone, which tell you how many steps you take each day and what your heart rate is. Starting today, San Francisco startup Sproutling is taking pre-orders for its Sproutling Baby Monitor, “the world’s smartest baby monitor,” a combination of a wearable band plus a charger and a mobile app. The device, designed to fit tiny feet and wrists, gathers 16 measurements every second to help parents see if the baby’s heart rate is higher or lower than usual or when the baby is most likely to wake up.

Other metrics — like if the baby is awake, or if the room is loud — seem fairly obvious, unless, perhaps, the parent is in another room to “watch a second episode of Mad Men, or just sleep in a bit longer,” Sproutling’s press release says.

Well, what about normal baby monitors? Unimpressive, say Sproutling’s executives, who are new parents themselves and former Apple and Google engineers.

“Parents have been relying on baby monitors for over 75 years and in that time, they fundamentally haven’t changed at all,” co-founder Chris Bruce said in a statement. “They continue to be a poor extension of parents’ eyes and ears and require constant attention to see if your baby is moving or making noise.”

The gadgets cost $249 for early birds and $299 ordinarily, and will be shipped in early 2015.